search for: unperceptible

This might have been talked about before, but I'm posting anyhow. I've got down to testing Asterisk yesterday, and I couldn't help but compare it with Skype (a Windoze only product, yet, but extremely efficient for some reason). Skype has almost unperceptible delay (LAN), while there is almost half a second of delay regardless of the codec on Asterisk. An even if we were to eliminate the latency on asterisk, Skype has at least 2x the quality of PSTN, let alone any codec on asterisk. So I ask: are there no royalty-free codecs that come close to those f...